


That One Time Bucky Barnes Bought an Ice Cream Truck

by bluesyturtle



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Conversations, Developing Friendships, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Guilt, Heart-to-Heart, Ice Cream, Just Friends, No Romance, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thor Is Not Stupid, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 22:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3786631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky came into some money for not being K.I.A. and knows exactly how to spend the first bit of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That One Time Bucky Barnes Bought an Ice Cream Truck

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt originally from cindehella’s tumblr post:  
> http://cindehella.tumblr.com/post/83837706552/official-titles-of-upcoming-marvel-movies-starring

Darcy taught Thor how to play Chinese checkers the last time he saw Jane, so refreshing Barnes’ understanding of the game is a simple task. As proof, Barnes wins their first match, teasing wryly that Thor shouldn’t go easy on him.

Thor wins their second match and their third. Barnes wins their fourth.

“All right, this one’s the tie breaker,” he murmurs, plucking at the dark blue marbles on the board.

Thor does the same with the translucent brown marbles mostly occupying the semicircular depressions on Barnes’ side of the round wooden board. He allows himself to be calm and quiet here, having noted in their previous encounters that Barnes responds equally well to silence and conversation but prefers to be allotted control in whichever mode he finds himself.

A marble jumps out from between Thor’s fingers. Barnes catches it deftly, barely even looking up from the board as his other hand continues its work. Thor carefully extracts the brown marble from Barnes’ metal hand, feeling that he should say something and then realizing that there is one thing he can safely say.

“Thank you, Barnes.”

Barnes lifts his chin, eyes still cast down before they flick up briefly to catch Thor’s. His mouth twitches at one side, and he says, “Yeah.”

A thought of speech burbles half-fathomed in Thor’s mind. He opens his mouth but stops, catching his lip between his teeth instead of producing words. He finishes repositioning the brown marbles on his side of the board. Barnes wins their final round but only by a move.

“Well, that’s all it takes, buddy,” Barnes croons happily like a cat after the requisition of cream. “I don’t need to tell _you_ that, I guess.”

“No,” Thor tells him. “I have lived war. I know.”

Something about the admission, gently given as it is, causes Barnes to go still. A tendon shivers in his neck with momentary tension. He clears his throat, and Thor casually resets the board.

They play another game without meaning to.

“Did I hear it right that you’ve got a brother?” Barnes asks as they’re clearing the board.

“Younger,” Thor answers, adding, “adopted, but my kin all the same.”

It is right that Barnes would ask about Loki. It’s the methodical kind of move Thor might expect from his brother, after all, if he felt like he was being handled, which Thor told himself he would not do with the team’s newest compatriot. Barnes must detect that Thor sees something familiar in him. Whether it’s Barnes’ quiet disposition sometimes emphatically heaved into reactionary emotion or his protective sarcasm, Thor can’t say. He isn’t sure Barnes has intuited which one it is that triggers memories of the past.

Thor has learned the hard way that some people will snap at encouragement if it bears any resemblance to coddling, so he’s trying—gods, but he’s _trying_ —for subtlety. In spite of his efforts, he can’t help but worry he looks more like Jǫtunn plodding clumsily through the pristine halls of Valhalla, knocking everything down as he passes.

“So what’s he like?”

Barnes hops a dark blue piece over three of Thor’s brown pieces, smirking to himself at whatever face Thor makes in his distraction.

“Loki had a way of getting under anyone’s skin,” Thor says wistfully, tapping the pad of one finger against the smooth side of the board. “He was the best strategist I have ever known. People could forget so easily that he was a warrior like the rest of us—in Asgard, you understand. He possessed strength that was different than my own, but it was strength, and he was commendable for it.

“He struggled with his difference and rebelled as young men do, but we loved him.” Thor moves a marble over the green one Barnes just moved. With some finality, he says, “He was my brother.”

Barnes idles on his turn. Thor looks up to find him staring at the table with a wrinkle between his eyebrows.

“I didn’t know, sorry.”

Thor nods his head once and lays his palms on his knees. “Your condolences are welcome, but do not pity me his loss. He was slain in battle, fighting for all of us. It was a noble death.”

He keeps his jaw rigid as he says the words he’s long convinced himself to be the truth. There can be no sense in grieving here, though the pain of loss is still so sharp in his chest. Barnes tenses through the pause, looking poised to say something that he ultimately restrains when he catches Thor’s gaze with his own. Thor doesn’t confirm in words what his expression must plainly communicate already if Barnes’ resigned look of understanding is anything to judge by.

They finish the match. Thor wins, mostly due to a new unspoken distraction that has come over Barnes. He wonders if he’s being invited to speak more about Loki as they’re wordlessly arranging the pieces for another match. Barnes doesn’t prompt him, so Thor takes it upon himself to run with it.

While he is perfectly capable of sitting in companionable silence, Thor isn’t one to favor it over conversation between friends. And Barnes is at least an ally if not a friend. Surely chatter between warriors is acceptable here as it is in Asgard. Talk of his brother is the farthest subject from frivolity that Thor can imagine.

“For my curiosity, what did you hear about him?”

Barnes smirks without seeming to mean to and shrugs one shoulder before moving a marble. He muses, “I heard he gave you hell every chance he got, but then, I guess I’m one to talk.”

“Yes, I heard something similar about you from Wilson and Rogers.” Thor smiles and recalls his own hardships with Loki as if through a softened, infinitely fonder lens. “You are matched in Rogers—a worthy opponent by all accounts.”

“Steve said he and your brother squared off once,” Barnes deflects easily, seamlessly.

“They did. Stark intervened. Loki was taken captive. It was how we met. You must know this.”

Amused, Barnes answers, “You intercepted them midair and derailed the mission—cavalier. I like it.”

“Had I known the circumstances surrounding his predicament aboard that vessel, I like to believe I would have reacted differently.”

“And the verdict?”

Thor shakes his head, confused emotions tugging at both corners of his mouth. Barnes drops his gaze and flexes the fingers of his right hand.

They play another round with six active banks rather than two so that they each have three colors to govern. Barnes manipulates the dark blue, the black, and the sky-colored marbles. Thor takes the glassy brown and two different shades of green. Barnes lands a pale blue marble in Thor’s sickly green camp, claiming the first victory.

“I get it,” he says in a quiet voice as Thor claims a victory in the black camp with a dark green marble.

Thor doesn’t reply. It’s enough to leave the admission be.

Barnes pauses and sits up, looking up from their remaining camps of his dark blue and Thor’s clear brown. Their pieces are positioned at fairly equal distances from each other’s home base with an even distribution of space and scattered marbles between them. The rules of the game don’t allow for the promise of a tie, but it will be another close match. Barnes exhales once through his nose.

“I’m hungry.”

“Pop tarts are good for that, I’ve been told,” Thor offers, not giving much credence to it himself but trusting Darcy’s testimony over his own. He pats his pockets, feeling for the tiny device Stark made him take before he and the others left for an outdoor concert of some sort. “Our friends will know where we can procure sustenance.”

The phone’s case at least offers protection (Thor dropped it several times on purpose to test its efficacy), but it holds awkwardly in his hand. His rational mind tells him Midgardians’ finesse with them is not inborn but learned and acquired. He learned to wield Mjölnir; he could learn to hold a cell phone comfortably.

But the screen and its lack of solid buttons! 

“No, that’s not really it.” Barnes waves his hand, raising an eyebrow at Thor’s forceful handling of the phone. “I don’t want food.”

Thor gratefully pockets the phone, stands, and follows after Barnes surefooted retreat. He spares a glance to their unfinished game. Suspiciously, he asks, “What will you eat if not food?”

“I just—” Barnes laughs, not expecting to and disrupting his easy stride for the sake of closing his eyes as he shakes his head. He opens them a few seconds later and searches out a leather jacket by the exit. “Let’s just walk around. I’ll show you what I mean.”

He hesitates at the door with his eyes on Thor, checking him for a response. Thor just nods an enthusiastic yes and follows him out into the hall.

Barnes moves among the crowd outside with deceptively lazy concentration. He reminds Thor of Loki in battle, oddly enough—Loki, who would appear to be standing still but whose image would merely be a perfect copy of a perfect copy of a perfect copy: by the time the ruse was discovered, there he would be ten steps ahead of everyone.

Thor sees Barnes scanning throngs of people on the sidewalk a few times in the same way, eyes dark but bright at the same time. He holds his head high while the deceptively wilted slouch in his spine gives him the appearance of being unguarded.

He keeps his left hand tucked firmly in a deep jacket pocket, and he doesn’t speak or fidget needlessly. Barnes is deliberate in all things, including his lackadaisical stride and visibly imperfect posture.

They walk two blocks before Barnes nods at Thor for him to follow, though Thor has been following his lead since they left the Tower. Their feet stop on a sidewalk decorated in realistic chalk drawings. Thor shuffles in place so that his feet don’t scuff the artwork reaching out for him from the concrete.

“Can I get one of those red ones? Yeah, thanks. Hey, pick one. I’m buying.”

Thor looks up at the plethora of images to which Barnes gestures with the hand holding a folded green bill. He points to a green one on the top row, and Barnes barks a laugh and hands off the money. He tells the vendor, “And a ‘fat frog’, please.”

Barnes steps forward to retrieve their treats with one hand, each of them protected by a crinkly yellow wrapper. He hands Thor his, and they walk a bit further to a park not a minute out from the truck. Thor follows Barnes’ example and tears through the wrapper, drops the discarded sheath in a garbage can, and looks at the unlikely shape of the cartoonish amphibian smiling at him.

“Have a bite,” Barnes says, taking a bite of his own Popsicle that looks bizarrely like the mask to Stark’s suit. “You won’t hurt him.”

“Is there frog in this?” Thor asks warily.

Barnes goes still around his second lingering bite of the two-toned helmet mounted on his Popsicle stick. He coughs after a strained swallow.

“No,” he reassures him, perforating the air with the blade of his metal hand once before he plumbs it back into his pocket. He gives Thor an assessing glance and reconsiders. “Would you eat it if there was frog in it?”

“Is that not the custom?”

Barnes’ face goes blank momentarily. He shakes his head. “There’s no frog in it. It’s sweet. Try it.”

Thor tries it, taking a bold bite in the fashion Barnes has been modeling for him. The taste bursting apart behind his teeth as the morsel melts on his tongue is crisp and sweet as advertised. He rolls the flavors around on the roof of his mouth picking the components apart and decides the mellower note behind the obvious apple is melon.

“Good, huh?”

“Yes,” Thor says, nodding once in agreement. “Not like a frog.”

Barnes smirks at his Popsicle, clearly a model of Iron Man the longer Thor stares at it in denial of that fact. He can’t help but ask, “Why do you eat Stark’s image?”

“Because it amuses me.” Barnes emphasizes his point by locking eyes with Thor and biting off a yellow portion of the mask. He takes his time consuming it and adds, leisurely, “Besides, Steve doesn’t have one. Next best thing.”

Thor nods, understanding. He clarifies, “It is an expression of friendship and respect.”

Barnes blinks a few times with his lips around the gnawed edges of the half-eaten Popsicle. Thor takes a few bites out of the frog on his stick and hums happily. 

“Had I known,” he says cheerfully, “I would have chosen more wisely.”

Barnes clears his throat and finishes his Popsicle with unmistakable pink in his cheeks. Thor matches him and flicks his barren stick for a trashcan, grinning when it goes in. Barnes rolls his eyes and asks if Thor wants another one as he’s standing to his feet.

He brings back a red, white, and blue Popsicle for Thor and a pink, crumbly one for himself. They go through those and a few more before sitting contently on their shared bench to observe fellow park-goers. 

“Do you like it here?” Barnes asks him, eyes looking out beyond the park at something Thor can’t track.

“On earth?” The answering silence registers in his mind as an affirmative. “It can be beautiful here, but dreadful as well.”

“How?”

“Your people,” Thor replies, measuring his words before he speaks them. “So many of them are charitable, good, and intelligent beyond the scope my words could lend. It often seems that there are just as many who are the opposite: people who are selfish, driven by the wrong desires, or deluded into believing that the idols they have built from the mortar of their intentions make what they do right even in the face of their wrongs.

“Jane is of Earth,” Thor adds, smiling softly at the thought of her. “Our friends are of earth. Coming here has taught me more about compassion and cruelty than I would have thought possible. I was arrogant and proud when I was first sent here; it was humans that helped me earn my redemption. You are a brave race of beings.”

He steals a sly glance at Barnes and says, referring back to what Barnes had said to him earlier, “Needless for me to tell you that, is it not?”

Barnes moves his lips together and looks down, jaw continuing to work beneath his skin. A rash of red mists the peachy tone of his skin and Thor faces forward, giving him time to respond or to not respond as he wishes. When he says nothing, Thor doesn’t either. It’s only a little later when Barnes has returned to a neutral emotional state that he asks, “Who’s Jane?”

Thor grins at the question, unabashed and willing to talk for hours if Barnes gives the merest sign of indulging him. He does for a while, smiling very faintly when Thor says things like, “Jane loves science more than food” and “You think I jest, but she loves science more than food.”

Barnes nods his approval, sending a jolt of pride and affection right through Thor’s chest. His face warms with a happy, slightly delirious glow.

“She sounds smart.”

“She is as smart as she is courageous.”

“A good match for you then,” Barnes replies, tipping his head.

The compliment slows Thor down but not enough to be noticeable, he thinks. He just nods a few times, his smile dwindling by small, gradual increments.

“And you, Barnes,” he prompts. “Have you come into new acquaintances as of late?”

“Everything’s new to me,” he says blandly with a shrug. The lazy drawl of his voice stretches too thin and sounds strained to Thor’s ears, but he makes no comment. “I don’t know, I’ve got Steve most of the time, and Sam’s good at keeping us both honest. He knows all the tricks and triggers…that kind of thing.”

He drops his chin, eyes searching the ground where the pigeons cross for more answers yet. His shoulders shift against the back of the bench, and he continues, voice nonchalant but ultimately betrayed by his eyes that never stop roving as if he’s reading his thoughts off a scroll.

“Banner’s quiet, level, solid. I get why Stark’s drawn to him—he’s got humility like I didn’t think was possible, sometimes. Natasha’s the only one who has some idea what it’s like, doing what I’ve done. Clint is unbelievably smart and skilled at hiding just _how_ smart.”

Barnes presses his lips together and hunches his shoulders up before relaxing them again. He keeps his gaze firmly on the ground, finally staring at one fixed point rather than searching. His voice sounds thicker when he starts again.

“And I think…” He pauses to lick his lips, the silence prolonged by a steadying swallow. He murmurs, “I think you know what it feels like to…to be different from everyone else, and for everyone to look at you and see that difference—that _Other-ness_.”

Thor waits until his own heartbeat slows down. He waits until Barnes tips his head back to take a deep breath and let it go. He doesn’t mention that all of the Avengers have the stamp of ‘Other-ness’ on them or that any one of them might empathize exactly with what Barnes is describing, especially Dr. Banner. Barnes is clearly making a point in singling him out.

And perhaps, Thor realizes slowly, the point is not Thor at all.

Softly he says, “As I understand it, an alien is a being come from outside this realm?”

Barnes doesn’t reply. Thor takes the non-answer to be another affirmative.

“We are apart, but we match them too closely to seem truly foreign.” Thor nods, keeping his gaze pointed out at the trees rather than directing it at Barnes when he sees him look up in his peripheral vision. “I told you Loki was adopted,” he says with deliberate slowness, gauging whether he has taken the right direction with every spoken word. “He was of Jötunheimr, but from childhood he looked nothing like the Jötnar at all. His visage was as our own, a face that would pass for ‘normal’ here.”

Thor gestures between them for emphasis.

“How’d he do that?”

“It was our father’s magic. Unbeknownst to either of us, he had taken it upon himself to camouflage Loki in a guise that would match his assumed birthright rather than that which fate chose for him. It masked his appearance for many years. It was not until an object of his people came to be in our possession that Loki reverted back to his true form or came to know he had a form separate from what he knew himself to be. It was when he discovered his identity.”

“Sounds like a rude awakening,” Barnes mumbles.

“It was, yes.”

“And you said he rebelled. Guess I know why.”

Thor nods, watching his neighbor for a few seconds before daring to ask, “Do you have family?”

His question doesn’t earn an extreme reaction. Barnes barely moves. He only says, “A sister, Rebecca.”

“Does she know of you?”

“Does my sister who hasn’t seen me in seventy-odd years know what big brother’s been up to, who he’s killed, and why? No, she doesn’t know.” He shrugs against the back of the park bench as if his skin has become uncomfortable to breathe within. “She and her husband, their kids…they don’t need to know about me. I’ve done enough without dragging them through it.”

“May I touch you, Barnes?” Thor asks, turning where he sits so he can face Barnes head-on. 

Though there’s a wrinkle between his eyebrows, Barnes nods. When Thor doesn’t move, he mutters, “Sure, fine.”

Thor raises his hand slowly, always keeping the motion in Barnes’ line of sight. His hand lands gently on Barnes’ right shoulder. He would not presume to touch his left where body meets body in such ways as are too intimate for Thor to deserve without asking permission in so many words. The hard line of Barnes’ clavicle where flesh mingles blood and bone resists the weight of his hand, every bit as sturdy as Thor expected.

Barnes flicks his eyes from Thor’s hand to his arm and finally to his face where their eyes lock for an intense few seconds wherein Thor wonders sincerely if Barnes can read his mind.

“Whatever you have done, Barnes—whatever ill you have wrought that you think is unforgiveable, your worth in the eyes of those who know you is not a composite of the past that wrought you. It can never eclipse the good that you have done or all the good things you will bring in ages to come.”

Thor squeezes Barnes’ shoulder when he looks away to blink the glossy sheen from his eyes, but he doesn’t force Barnes to look at him. He only waits for Barnes to straighten his posture and give him his glance once more. The whites of his eyes have gone ruddy with irritation and the line of his mouth has stretched thin and tight.

“I cannot guess what Rebecca would think—there would be too many thoughts to count.” Her name sounds and feels so familiar, so curiously warm that it’s no wonder it softens some inscrutably hard shadow in Barnes’ face. “I can never know her mind simply because I, too, lost a brother, just as I will never know what you have been through by the fact of my own experiences in battle, here or in Asgard.” Thor squeezes Barnes’ shoulder again. “But I do know that the gift of a second chance is among the most precious things in the whole of the universe.”

Barnes huffs a quiet chuckle, the muscles around his mouth loosening but looking more morose for it. He says, “Jeez, no pressure or anything.”

Thor takes his hand away.

“Forgive me. It wasn’t my intention.”

“Oh.”

Barnes nods, sinking tiredly into the bench and watching the pigeons mingle with the crows at their feet. His nose twitches once soundlessly. He scrubs the back of his right hand over each eye quickly and wordlessly. Thor’s stomach sinks around indefensible guilt.

“I meant only that this chance is yours and that you deserve it,” Thor amends by way of apologizing a second time. “This _life_ is yours, and no one can chain you to the deeds of yesterday unless you consent to be in chains.”

He falters at the sight of smudged moisture crowning the apples of Barnes’ cheeks and loses his words at the mechanical plunge of that hand back into its respective jacket pocket. The look he gives Thor out the side of his eye is composed, emotionally if not completely in appearance.

“Don’t apologize for talking to me like a human being.”

“I criticized you,” Thor protests, voice dropping for his desire to sound as sincere as he feels. “It was not my place.”

“Thor,” Barnes stops him, turning to look him dead in the eye. His eyes move slowly between Thor’s, searching again before settling. Firmly, he tells him, “Thanks.”

Blinking, it takes Thor a moment to alert to Barnes’ hand settled on his arm. As the weight registers in his mind, so do the park’s surrounding stimuli flood back to him—the faint chill riding the mild breeze, the birds cooing, and the subtle smell of dogs and people and life all around them. Thor nods once, accepting silently what he doesn’t trust himself to acknowledge with words for how unwarranted Barnes’ gratitude feels.

“I know you’ve been trying not to tiptoe around me,” he says a moment later, startling Thor out of his thoughts. “I know you think I deserve…more than what I’ve let myself believe I do. You want to convince me that I’m redeemable. I get it.”

“You are redeemable, Barnes.”

He sighs softly, dodging the look Thor gives him to rise from the bench. “They’ll be back from the concert soon. We should head back so they don’t think we flew the coop.”

“Is that what we’ve done?” Thor asks curiously, willing to change the subject to shallower waters if it will ease the slow-building tension between them. He reconsiders the turn of phrase and deadpans, “As long as Stark’s suits remain in-tact, I doubt they will suspect we have flown anywhere.”

Barnes gives him a flat look that disperses Thor’s worry. He asks Thor to wait on the sidewalk while he approaches the ice cream truck and has quick words with the driver.

Thor doesn’t know of what they speak, but the driver hands Barnes a slip of paper with scribbled numbers that Barnes tucks away into a pocket without explaining before he falls into step with Thor. They walk back in leisurely silence to the Tower and the studied guardedness of Barnes’ sure strides does not fade even as the tense line of his shoulders slackens.

They play another round of Chinese checkers before their friends return, aglow from the festivities but also pleasantly, authentically calm. Rogers peers over Thor’s shoulder while he moves a pale glassy brown piece. Thor watches Barnes flick his eyes from the board to the place Rogers’ face must occupy behind him before looking critically at the board and jumping four of Thor’s pieces.

Barnes murmurs, “Hot damn, Steve.”

Thor hears Stark laugh and swears, though he doesn’t feel the language anywhere but in his mouth. He does, however, turn a betrayed look on Rogers, who has the grace to look mildly ashamed. Mildly.

“I consumed frozen treats in your honor,” he tells him, pretending to be wounded.

“You did what?” Rogers is asking, but Thor almost misses it beneath the explosive sound of Barnes’ laughter that mixes a scoff with something close to a sneeze.

Thor forgets what he intended to say next. The stunned look on Rogers’ face is satisfying enough.

Even more so when he says, producing a gentler version of the sound Barnes made, “Did you just _snort_?”

**Author's Note:**

> Disregarding potentially traumatic things that will happen in Age of Ultron, I wanted to write some fluffy Bucky. Also it's probably not clear that Bucky actually bought the ice cream truck, but clarifying that would require an extra 2k knowing me. Feh.
> 
>  
> 
> I wanted to write all of cindehella's prompts because they're wonderful, but this is the only one I could manage. <3


End file.
